RFI Musique: Your new album includes reworkings of a number of your old songs. What gave you the idea for this?
Bill Deraime: I got the idea back in 2005. It was just after I'd played at the Olympia, after pulling through this really long and difficult period working with the same tour organiser. That concert was like my final "farewell gift" to him because we broke off our working relationship straight afterwards. I played another fateful series of concerts in the legendary Paris venue in 1985. I did a fortnight at the Olympia - which I felt was much too long even at the time - which triggered a period of manic depression in my life. Manic depression is a very painful thing to live with. You have these mad mood swings that go right up from euphoric then down to the blackest kind of down and you suffer from extreme sensitivity to the things happening around you. I suffered long intermittent bouts of depression where I stopped everything. The release of my live album recorded at Le New Morning in 2004 went nowhere and that didn't really help matters much. The major labels didn't want to touch me after that and I admit I really hit rock bottom at that point. I realised I had two choices in life: either I could drop everything there and then or I could adopt a mystical viewpoint. It was at that point that I picked up my walking stick and set off down a well-travelled pilgrim's route that I won't name here. When I returned I found my old twelve-string Guild guitar waiting for me.

So it was your old guitar that was the starting point for Bouge Encore…
What happened was I picked up my Guild - my old friend from my gospel years - and started singing my old blues songs again and it was like a rebirth, like I'd discovered a new depth and breadth of sound. I started working on my songs with the idea of playing them solo with carefully-crafted melodic and rhythmic arrangements. This was a clear improvement on my ordinary technique where I'm normally a singer-guitarist accompanied by musicians. As time went on, the project became a major preoccupation of mine and I threw myself into it body and soul. It was my old electro-acoustic Guild which influenced the overall sound on the album - which is pretty raw, stripped back and basically amplified but unplugged. It was once I'd hit upon that overall sound that I got my usual recording team together for a studio session.

You describe your original songs as "rough demos" that have only fulfilled their true potential thanks to the new reworkings on Bouge encore…
Well, you could say the same thing about my personality really - the Bill Deraime I was back then was only a rough outline of the Bill Deraime you see before you now! Reworking these old songs was my way of going back to the source, back to an essential kind of truth. When I was younger I was a beatnik, hippie kind of guy. I used to go round singing without even thinking about it, you know, busking in the métro, playing my guitar wherever I travelled in a laidback kind of way without ever worrying about money. And it was that sort of freedom that allowed me to express my emotions the most truthfully. After that carefree period in my life, I succumbed to commercial pressures and became obsessed with appearances. I got caught up in the dog-eat-dog world of showbiz. I don't think that changes you on a deeper level, but it certainly changes you externally. What I'm trying to do now is turn round and find that fundamental essence I lost. I'm having to strike out there like a pioneer and dig deep, deep down to strike gold. Alternatively, you can think of things being like a rocket with all these different sections containing our different personalities - you have to let the lower sections of the rocket drop away before you get to the top section, the one that gives you your freedom!

Choosing Bouge encore (Still moving) as the title of your new album shows you also see an element of humour in your comeback from the dead…
I think Zep's illustration on the cover* expresses things perfectly. That old hound dog says it all really - he's been through the hell of the concert circuit and now he's sitting on a dustbin howling away up a back alley with his old twelve-string under his arm. It's a simple, human line drawing that basically reminds people I'm not dead yet!

For a layperson, I'm a great believer, you know. And what I believe is that music is the form of art that comes closest to mysticism. When I play music I delve right down into the depth of my guts, I give myself over to the muse and the movement of life… To me, a guitar represents the strings of the soul. And that's why I can speak about having experienced a resurrection - I've strummed the strings of my soul and come back to life again. And believe me, the further down you've gone in the past the higher you come up again when you bounce back - that's the point at which you truly become an artist! I've experienced moments of intense joy thanks to Bouge encore like when I presented the album for the first time live on stage and another magical concert I played in Saint-Etienne. On this album I'm really saying thankyou to all those people who've supported me through my darkest moments. I'm saying a big thankyou to my friends and all my fans who share similar ethics to me.

So blues for you is an art that comes straight from the soul?
The creative process goes beyond intellect alone and draws on feelings, sensations, the heart, the soul and gut instinct. And, naturally, the way you choose to live your life has a direct influence on your music, too. Great singers like Ray Charles and Edith Piaf lived life fully and intensely and, in my mind, they belong to the tradition of the blues. Then there's someone like Bob Marley whose songs are like biblical psalms that have been brought up to date to make them accessible to everyone. Marley's songs are infused with a poetry that is both unique to his work and universal. They seek a meaning to life, a meaning we're all desperately grasping for.

I would say I lead my own sort of "blues"/"gospel" existence, while striving to turn towards a more positive form of art like Ben Harper or The Neville Brothers. Before I used to simply try and play the bluesman, but these days I'm really trying to be open to more positive elements. At the end of the day, I believe blues is the juice of life. Blues comes from your soul, from deep within your guts, from an accumulation of life experiences and from a desire to put those feelings across to others. And that makes the spirit of blues eminently modern!

Your singing style appears to have evolved on your new album to the point where you scream and shout at times…
The primal scream is a salutary release, a cry you give at the moment of birth and of death. And what do we do when we can't take any more? We open our mouths and scream! For me, music is a cry of pain that turns into an explosion of joy. Let me tell you, I've reached a point these days where it's not Bill singing in the world - but the world singing in Bill!